Dr. Moore Agar, an excellent physician with whom I once attended surgery, promptly agreed to call at Baker Street the following afternoon. If Holmes paid little attention to my urges for him to meet his own basic needs, I was hopeful he might at least consider the advice of another professional with whom he did not share a bed. Dr. Agar was quite alarmed at my friend’s condition, and implored Holmes to dispense with the morphine and leave the confines of Baker Street at once if he wanted to avoid a complete and career-threatening breakdown. To my great relief, it took only minimal coaxing to incite Holmes to agree, and the two of us departed for the Cornish peninsula the following day.

I engaged a charming whitewashed cottage on the edge of PoldhuBay, a place of sombre and dramatic beauty that suggested centuries of human struggle, of shipwrecks, violent storms and lost mariners. But it was only serenity that prevailed upon our arrival. High cliffs plunged away from grassy headlands, the bright blue sea gently swept upon the shore below and an ever-present breeze kept a freshness about the cool, salty air.

I was heartened by the fact that the journey alone seemed to have benefited my companion, for Holmes’s pallor was much less pronounced than when we left Baker Street that morning. In fact, he was well enough to argue with me over the subject of his health, the poor state of which was the only blazingly obvious fact ever to escape the man. But his acerbic challenges vexed me little, for I was too glad to be away from the stifling air of Holmes’s sickroom where he had languished uncommunicative and dispirited.

I felt light and hopeful as I unloaded our carriage and set our bags in the small vestibule near the front of the cottage. I inspected each of the rooms and was pleased to find them neat and accommodating. Holmes had wrapped himself in a blanket, settled at the table in the front room and commenced paging through the local parish magazine. I left him there to take a short stroll down to the cliff nearest the cottage.

When I returned, I started to chatter excitedly of the exquisite beauty that surrounded us when the scene before me stopped me dead in my tracks.

He was hastily throwing his blanket over his arm too late, for I had already seen the tourniquet. In front of him lay the Moroccan case and needle, which he made a weak attempt to cover with his foot. This was the first time that I confronted him face to face in the act of preparing to inject himself.

Devastated, I reached down and picked up the solution-filled needle. I heard him draw a sharp breath.

“Is it worth it, Holmes,?” I asked him in a small voice. I could not meet his gaze.

“Yes,” he whispered after a painful moment of silence.

“As you wish,” I replied evenly, and carefully set the needle back down on the table where I found it.

I grimly resumed unpacking, willing myself to remain calm despite the familiar knots of dread that tightened my stomach and shattered my hopes for a smooth convalescence. I would remind him of Dr. Agar’s strict orders to keep himself clean in the days to come. For now, I simply wanted to believe that Holmes’s desire to recuperate outweighed his appetite for cocaine, and that he would be at least be wise enough to use a minimal solution.

I rather started when I heard a sharp knock at the side door of the cottage. I opened it to reveal our neighbor, the town vicar by the name of Mr. Roundhay, who had come to welcome us to Cornwall. His stout face was flush with excitement when he confessed that he was quite eager to meet the great detective. I could not turn this kind man away, so I led him into the front room and introduced him to Holmes. So enchanted was Roundhay with the great man before him that Holmes’s cocaine-fueled eccentricities affected him not at all, and the two laughed heartily together as they conversed. He left us with a generous invitation to have dinner at his vicarage during our stay.

Over the next few days, Holmes spent long hours walking around the moors, gazing at the sea and immersing himself in solitary meditations. He seemed rather enchanted with the foreboding atmosphere of Cornwall, and I kept my distance as he set himself adrift in our mysterious surroundings. I was still struggling with the renewed sense of betrayal over my discovery that he had continued his deplorable habit on a journey that was designed to improve his health. For the first time in my life, I wished I’d been endowed with Holmes’s singular ability to compartmentalize his thoughts and feelings; I was starting to believe that if our positions were reversed, he would simply detach from concern after so many stubborn refusals to cease treating myself like a human pincushion.

Most nights, I fell asleep alone in the large bed, over a book or a journal that I would read until my eyelids dropped of their own volition. I know not where Holmes slept, or if he slept at all, save for the one curious instance in which I felt him slip into bed next to me. It was well after midnight and I was nearly asleep, but I was aware of his arm encircling my waist and pulling me gently to him. The gesture touched me deeply, but I did not press him about it in the morning.

Then, on the following Tuesday, an extraordinary chain of events led us into the strangest case Holmes has ever taken. I had just returned to the cottage from a stroll to town when I found Holmes deep in conversation with Mr. Roundhay and a dark-haired, frightened-looking man named Mortimer Tregennis.

I opened my mouth to protest, for Dr. Agar had admonished Holmes of engaging in any affairs that would threaten his health. But something in my friend’s face stopped me. It was his eyes. The fire had again lit behind them, and they were shining with a trenchant interest I had not seen in weeks. Though he still appeared thin and frail underneath his large blanket, his gaze bore unmistakable signs of his characteristic spirit. I was so astonished by the transformation that I remained silent, and turned my attention to considering the extraordinary set of events that Tregennis recited.

In short, the facts are these: After an evening of playing cards with his siblings, Tregennis departed the family’s estate and went to his own home. The very next morning, an urgent call summoned him to return to Tregannick Wartha where, to his great horror, he found his sister dead, and his two brothers foaming at the mouth and babbling incoherently. Their faces were twisted into the most terrible expressions, and no one in the house seemed to know what had transpired in that room between the time Tregennis left and when he returned.

And so it began. Holmes and I commenced with a full investigation in our usual manner. We visited Tregannick Wartha, interviewed the staff, examined the premises and spent long hours in conversation over every facet of the crime. I must admit it was wonderful to be with him again in this way. Not only was this case remarkably compelling, but seeing Holmes return to his element boosted my own spirits and calmed my nerves considerably.

All that remained to rob me of sleep at night was the question of the inexplicable force that had been strong enough to kill one woman and drive her brothers insane. If Holmes knew what it was, he kept it to himself. Yet he was surprised as I was when Roundhay found Mortimer Tregennis dead a day later, and apparently through the same means as his siblings. We hurried to the vicarage where I tended the overwrought vicar with brandy and Holmes closely examined the lamp in the drawing room. I had not the faintest idea what he was looking for until the next day when he returned from town having purchased an identical lamp. He determinedly set it down on the table before us.

A combustion, Holmes explained, had occurred in both murders, and it precipitated the release of toxic vapours that exerted a profound effect on its victims. He showed me some remnants from the smoke guard of the lamp in question. He informed me rather gravely that he intended to test its effects and make certain that he had found the murder weapon. Would I stay with him?

What could I say? I was too weary from our ongoing battle over the needle to chide him for taking such a risk. I agreed to stay, simply because I had grown so desperately afraid I would lose him that if this activity did prove to be his ultimate undoing, I was certain that my very next act would be to figure out a way to follow him. If my love wasn’t enough to save him from himself, then at least my loyalty could lend strength to us both.

He upended the powder onto the lamp. When the circle of smoke started to rise, a caustic odor filled the room. My mind clouded and everything around me began to slip away.

Something horrible overtook me, and I was consumed by an overwhelming sense of dread. Emerging from the darkness were vague figures representing such menace that I heard myself scream in terror at the certainty that they would suffocate me to death. I closed my eyes and tried to shut out the vision, but it penetrated all my senses and I fell to the floor. I could not stop the parade of disturbing thoughts and images that incessantly repeated themselves in my mind where rational thought used to be. I felt my own features begin to morph into something other than myself, my extremities growing absurdly large but entirely useless, my eyes growing out of my head so they saw a reflection of myself staring helplessly back. I clawed desperately at nothing, so sure that I was being swallowed into the very depths of Hell that if ever I should see light again I would vow never to take leave of it.

There was another scream. It did not come from me, but from Holmes, whose face bore such unimaginable fear that I recovered myself enough to drag us both into the outside world and away from the poisonous atmosphere in which we flailed. All my fears and anxieties returned as I shook him and frantically called his name. He had been closer to the lamp than I, and feared he suffered more adverse effects.

Gradually, the madness in his eyes began to clear and with a great sigh of relief I saw that he recognized me. He reached up and clung to my neck.

“Upon my word, Watson,” he gasped, “It was an unjustifiable experiment for myself, doubly so for a—“, he stopped and stared at me. “MyGod, what have I done to you?”

****

We recovered ourselves in due time. I shall not recount the hours following that horrible encounter with the drug, but suffice it to say the name “Devil’s Foot” does not begin to describe its potential.

I watched Holmes dash into the cottage to retrieve the lamp, which he promptly carried out to the cliff and hurled into the sea. He then summoned Dr. Sterndale, an ex-pat recently back from Africa who had hovered on the periphery of our investigation, and in a few hours’ time we were ushering the large man into the front room. From him, we learned of the origins of the drug and how it came to be used in this particular instance. Mortimer Tregennis had stolen it from Sterndale’s collection of African roots, and employed it to murder his sister in hopes of gaining her share of the family’s fortune; Dr. Sterndale used it to exact his revenge on Tregennis, for he had dearly loved Brenda Tregennis and could not abide the savage manner in which she was killed.

Holmes once told me he’d rather play tricks with the law than with his own conscience, so it came as little surprise when he informed Sterndale that he would not prevent him from returning to Africa to finish his work. The two men shook hands and Sterndale departed a free man. As we watched him disappear over the moor, I could not help chiding Holmes for being more comfortable bypassing the law than ever before in his long career. He turned to me with clear, grey eyes that glinted in the sunlight.

“Now that I know something of love, I cannot deny that my sympathies lie rather with our lawless lion-hunter. Were anything so terrible to befall you, Watson, I would stop at absolutely nothing to bring the perpetrator to full justice, even if it meant the guarantee of my own destruction.”

“And I would do the same for you,” I told him, my voice full of emotion.

He smiled, kissed me gently and turned back to the cottage.

I remained where I was to contemplate the bitter irony that my life had become a struggle to do just that. That the “perpetrator” I continuously fought against was Holmes’s own conscience complicated matters infinitely. By all accounts, our stay in Cornwall had been a success, both in the solution of a case and the marked improvements in his health. But what was to happen when we returned home to Baker Street and no cases arrived on our doorstep? What words remained for me to try and convince him of the harm he visited upon himself every time he took up the needle?

My heart grew heavier on our return trip to London as I realized the near-impossibility of my position. I loved this man more than anything in the world, more than myself, more than anyone in my past or present, and yet I was forced to helplessly watch him nurture his penchant for self-destruction. My only recourse was either to remove myself entirely from his presence, or learn to steel myself against the habits to which he so stubbornly attached himself. One was unthinkable, the other inconceivable.

Such was my deeply troubled state of mind when I entered our sitting room the next day and saw the remains of Holmes’s makeup kit on the table. Among them was the dreaded Moroccan case, which lay open and empty.

Its owner was lounging in a chair in his dressing gown, wholly absorbed in the volume that lay in his lap.

“Where’s your needle, Holmes?” I asked him lightly. It would be unsanitary to misplace such an article, I told myself.

“Underneath the sand at PoldhuBay,” he replied, without looking up.

“And the vial of solution…?” I asked him incredulously.

“Lies next to it,” he said, as he turned a page.

“What?” I dared not hope.

“I think I shall dispense with the habit.” He looked up and smiled briefly. “It has the most unpleasant after-effects.”

“You told me they were worth it,” I retorted.

“They were,” he answered. He looked up and regarded me with a steady gaze.

“The look on your face was not.”

I was so taken aback that when I opened my mouth to speak no sound came out. I stared at Holmes in disbelief. He rose from his chair and approached me where I stood, gazing downward as he spoke with a sadness I’d never heard before.

“I fear I cannot…love you so well as you deserve, Watson. I am rather too hopelessly flawed to bestow upon you the pure, kind-hearted love which you continue to give so selflessly to me. The methods I have sought to relieve my fits have admittedly exacted a price on my physical well-being, though the pain I bring upon myself is less oppressive than the agonizing mental stagnation it replaces.”

His eyes were large and sincere when they looked again at mine. “But the pain it brings upon you is unbearable.”

I felt little more than a sense of relief that was so profound I sank to my knees. Holmes gently brought himself level with me, and took my face in his hands. He was murmuring words I did not hear, and kissing my lips while his thumbs pushed away the tears that flowed freely down my face. All I knew and wanted to know then was the overwhelming love and gratitude that washed away the weeks, months and years of untold strain upon my heart.

It was the one thing I had never asked him to do, for I only ever wanted him to see the worth of his own well-being and cherish it as much as I. But if giving it up for me was the only way to vanquish his habit, I would gladly be his reason for doing so.

There would be days in the future when his black mood got the better of him and challenged his resolve, and it was no less a challenge for me to make certain he was looking after his physical health. But a chance revisiting of his past cases on my part soon had him recounting once-forgotten details of adventures that occurred well before my time, distracting him from his melancholy and providing me with fodder for dozens of new stories. In this way, we would learn to work together to contend with the shadows that periodically crossed his mind.

For now, for us, here at Baker Street, newly committed to one another’s happiness, Holmes set about expressing his love the only way he knew how.

He showed me.

After a lengthy embrace, cravats were tossed away and articles of clothing shed until his naked body was writhing on top of mine. The weight and feel of him felt like a human salve upon my body and soul. I cradled his head in my palm as he slowly and sensually gyrated against me, his face buried in my neck, until his soft cries and intense shudder signaled his release. I smiled when I felt warm fluid spread across my stomach, and he whispered my name as I like to hear it in my ear.

Ever the skillful lover, Holmes shifted his weight just slightly so that my own member nestled into a narrow crevice between us, and I gasped as the friction brought sweet surges of pleasure to my groin as I undulated underneath him. When I reached my own completion, I uttered an ecstatic, shuddering sigh as my every nerve hummed in rapturous climax. Holmes pulled me closer to him as he often did when I came, a gesture that never failed to enhance my pleasure for knowing that he wanted to share my sensation.

No sooner had Holmes settled lazily against my chest in the heady aftermath of our lovemaking when Mrs. Hudson rang with afternoon tea. We hastily donned our dressing gowns, ushered her into the sitting room, and seated ourselves comfortably at the table, he with the Times and me with the day’s mail. All was well and calm again at Baker Street.

That is, until the following evening when the headmaster of a prominent boarding school staggered into our sitting room and collapsed onto the hearthrug. But that is a story I shall recount another time.

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Comments

God, this is gorgeous-- one of the most satisfying H/W fics I've read in a long time. Watson's sadness and helplessness were so palpable as he watched Holmes tear himself apart, the sex scene in the first part was both sexy and emotional, and this:

he stopped and stared at me. “My God, what have I done to you?”

...absolutely broke my heart. I loved the way you worked in Granada, too. Just beautiful, start to finish, and very well written. Brava!

I love how you handled the cocaine problem. It would be too easy to have Watson demand the Holmes choose but it was all important for Holmes to come to that conculsion himself. I also love the reference to other stories!

I love how you balance the horrible effects of his addiction on Holmes's relationship with Watson and Holmes's very real love of him -- it was fantastic, and I felt myself reading slower just to savor everything.

This was wonderful. You're a beautiful, poetic writer. You had me hooked from start to finish. The characterizations, descriptions, and voices were pitch perfect. Thank you for sharing such a moving story! :D

You have no idea how much it means to me to receive this comment right now. I was just browsing other H/W stories and marveling at the number of fic writers out there who have far more skills than I do. I am honored that anyone bothers to read my poor scribblings. :) Thank you, thank you.

LOL! I know what you mean. There is an incredibly large and talented group of writers currently writing in this fandom. I've pretty much come to the conclusion that I should stop writing myself and just read and admire because I know I don't measure up, but you do! You're one I want to read more from, and I intend to go through the rest of your stories as soon as I get another free minute. :D

What?? After "That Which Is Hidden?" Don't you dare give it up! lol You've got your own talents, too, and if you keep writing your stories will just get better and better. If it helps, I sometimes go to my favorite writers' journals and read some of their first fics. They're never as good as the later ones and in most cases, each one is better than the last. I was berating myself, too, for reusing old phrases in my fics until I realized that everyone does that. Hey, one good turn...

Come back anytime. :) You'll see I like to indulge in heavy doses of smut and sentiment.

BTW, I love your avatar. God, that Holmesian stare...*melts* I can't tell you how many sexy scenarios it has inspired me to write.

I thought I'd be reading this throughout the week, but I ended up printing pages and being thankful for the long and quiet commute I had today, because it allowed me to finish the story! Lovely work, it's so wonderful to read something flowing with such natural ease. Looking forward to the rest of your LJ.:)

Thank you so much for the beautiful compliment! I haven't written anything in a while (other pressing projects, bleah), so it's nice to know that someone out there is enjoying the work I've already done. Hope to get back to it soon!

This was wonderfully angsty and real and so IC that it was an incredible pleasure to read. You make their love deep, but never easy which is very believable. I love your shout out to Granada as well. You've made me a very happy fangirl. *sigh*

Difficult topic, but definitely a good one to handle at least one with Holmes and Watson. I really admired Watson's attitude of not trying to force Holmes to do anything, and not stopping loving him, but trying not to let himself get pulled into being part of the problem.